Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Isn’t Odd nearly God, as Margaret Crowe says.

Because the house is four rooms, each the depth of the building, Mam and Dad had to cross Nan’s to get to their end room. Their room is basically a cave. The entrance is four feet thick by five feet high, a little stone passageway Dad had to duck through to get inside. It was years before he stopped banging his head.

I still call it Mam and Dad’s room.

We are not Well-Off, we’ve never been Well-To-Do, never Upwardly Mobile or Going Places. A poet is upwardly mobile in a different sense, but it doesn’t butter your bread as Tommy Devlin says. Without explanation, I’ve always understood there was a reason Dad never ever bought new clothes, why he wore shoes with oval-shaped holes in the soles, why Mam cut his hair, why she cut mine, why there was a jar on the kitchen window where coins were kept and why the stock of them went up and down depending. I understood that my father only bought second-hand books, that he could go to Ennis in a tweed jacket of Grandfather’s and come back without it but with the Collected Poems of Auden (Book 1,556, Vintage, London), Grandfather’s jacket now in the front window of the Ugandan Relief Shop on Parnell Street. I understood there was a story inside the story, understood that once Grandfather Swain’s money was gone there was literally nowhere else for money to come from. My father would never accept Government Grants, Headage payments for cattle, or Unemployment. I am not unemployed . So as you go forward it won’t be money you’ll be seeing. It’ll be the unsung genius of Mam who performed the Second Miracle of Faha and kept the family afloat and this roof over our heads.

Go back to the front door now, turn left, and enter The Room. The floor slopes down towards you to let the mop-water flow out the front door — a feature the MacCarrolls should have trademarked and sold to IKEA, the Crooked Floor, not only for the convenience of cleaning, ladies and gentlemen, but because once you stand up the tilt takes you towards the door; the house encourages you to leave, to go out in the world. There is the wide hearth on your right, maybe ten feet for those who need particulars, with the dresser across from it. The fire is on the grate on the floor and there’s turf burning. In our chimney there’s always smoke rising. Mam never lets it go out. When she goes to bed at night she lifts the last sods with the tongs and places them under the grate where the fire sleeps until she knocks it glowing awake in the morning. It’s an old MacCarroll tale I think. Some pisheog or lore I may have once been told. Something to do with spirit in the house and not letting the hearth cool completely. Mam is a horde of such things, wild bits of MacCarrollisms; for most of the time she has learned to keep them under cover, but if you stay long enough and watch her carefully, watch this beautiful Clarewoman with the brown eyes and the loose long tussle of her wavy brown hair, the indomitableness in her bearing, simple country pride and courage, you will see them sometimes, things about magpies, about blackbirds, about going in front doors and going out back doors, about May blossom or hearing the cuckoo out of which ear or picking foxgloves or cutting holly bushes.

Nan’s chair with cushion consisting of recent back issues of the Clare Champion is right inside the hearth. Nan waits for the Champion on Thursday and when the Simons aren’t in full swing she goes straight to Deaths and Planning, which is basically a super-condensed version of Life’s Plot, ‘Johnny Flanagan’s building’ and ‘Johnny Flanagan’s dead’ only breaths apart.

The Room uses the dresser as a bookcase. Top shelf has these leatherbound editions of classics that came gifted from the Aunts. I smelled them long before I read them. I think they must have been my first soothers, me raw-cheeked and teething and crying and Aeney teething too and not crying, Mam looking around the Room for something to quieten me, grabbing Marcus Aurelias and plunging him up to my red cheeks. Hardy, Dickens, Brontë, Austen, St Augustine, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, I gummed and smelled my way into Literature.

Below this shelf are these big dinner plates on display, they’re wedding china that came from Aunts Penelope and Daphne some years before Lester and Chester. They were very china-giving aunts, which was of course secret warfare because the more they gave the more you had to find some place to display the stuff. We had china in boxes in the cabins that we couldn’t sell because it had to be taken out when The Aunts arrived. There isn’t much else in the room, a couple of armchairs and some wooden seats and what in Faha they call a form pronouncing it fur-um but which in the rest of the world is a bench.

At the back of The Room there’s the New Kitchen, just fridge and cooker and things all in the one small space with a galvanised-iron roof that is rusting orange on the inside and sings when it rains. It’s been New now for twenty years.

There’s a narrow stairs that rises from the front of The Room up and over the dresser. At the top is my room. You come in and the ceiling slants — MacCarrolls are all angles, angels if you’re dyslexic — so if you’re above five foot one and a half you stand at a tilt till you reach the skylight and then you can straighten a bit.

My bed and Aeney’s had to be built up here. One day Dad went out and came back with the timber. It had large dark holes in it where bolts had been removed. I think it came from Michael Honan who knew Dad didn’t have the money and to whom Dad promised to give Two Days when Michael was doing silage. That’s trade, Faha style. My father leased himself out and we got beds. He came home with these big heavy beams and brought them up the narrow stairs. Dad wasn’t a carpenter, but because of the Swain Philosophy he believed it shouldn’t be beyond him to make beds, and so he sawed and banged and sawed and banged for three days above our heads, letting little snows of sawdust down through the floorboards into our tea below. Aeney and I were forbidden to go see until the bed was done, but from the noise of the effort you could imagine that up there Dad was in mortal combat with his own limitations. It wouldn’t come right for him.

How hard could it be to join up four pieces of wood?

Well, if you didn’t want wobble, pretty hard it seemed.

He kept putting longer and longer screws in. The legs were the worst. Four legs wouldn’t support the weight evenly so he made two spare ones and added these but still the bed rocked and he was still falling short of Impossible Standard until Mam told him I was hoping it wasn’t going to be too solid but would still have a little give because I liked to rock myself to sleep.

This was always Mam’s role, to show Dad he was all right, to redeem him from the place he kept pawning himself into. So at last we went up the narrow stairs and saw: what he had made were more boats than beds, but I loved it, this big heavy sky-boat I still sail.

When I’m gone, when I’ve sailed away, it will have to be sawed apart to get it out. If you’ve been to Yeats Tower in Gort, restored by Mary Hanley (Hail Mary full of Yeats’s Martin McGrath said on our school tour), you’ll see his is the same, made at the top of the winding stair, too big to ever bring down again. They haven’t sawed it up. Not even the minister who’s driving the artists out of Ireland would dare saw up WBY’s bed, my father said. There’s no mattress though, just this big empty frame so it’s the best ghost-bed you’ve ever seen. WBY sleeps there sometimes still, probably September to May when the river rises and the tower is closed to poetry tourists and he needs a little more soul-polishing from the sleety winds of Gort.